


spring.

by spqr



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Academia, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff and Angst, Kid Fic, M/M, Professors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:55:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26401528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: Freshman year of undergrad, a random roommate match puts them together. Joe calls it destiny; Nicky calls it being the only two Medieval Studies majors in the school.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 47
Kudos: 627





	spring.

**Author's Note:**

> warning: too many semicolons!!!  
> also warning: i wrote this as an emotional purge

Freshman year of undergrad, a random roommate match puts them together. Joe calls it destiny; Nicky calls it being the only two Medieval Studies majors in the school.

Whatever it is, it sticks. Nicky sits on the floor by Joe's bedside when he shakes awake sobbing in the middle of the night and holds tight to his hand and doesn't ask about Iraq; Joe pretends he's never eaten very basic Italian foods like pizza and spaghetti just to see the muted alarm on Nicky's face; they fall briskly into an intimacy from which they never recover.

*

There are moments when it could end. A screaming fight in the boxed up remains of their first apartment, Nicky touching a nerve Joe didn't even know he had, Joe saying things he doesn't mean about Nicky trying too hard to make him normal, to make him into something he's not, a slamming door and Joe alone in the apartment for hours into the night, boxing up his books and then unboxing them in a sudden swell of panic-- _this can't be the end, it can't be_ \--even though they have to be out in the morning.

Putting on a jacket and wandering the quad in the cool spring night, frantic and trying not to look frantic because Middle Eastern men looking frantic end up in police stations and he has to find Nicky, he has to apologize, only then the sun is coming up and he hasn't found him so he limps back to the apartment and finds Nicky on the front step looking as bad as Joe feels, eyes red-ringed as he looks up and says _Yusuf_ in the misting rain, and there has never been any need for apologies between them; they apologize with their bodies, Joe's hands twisted in the back of Nicky's sweatshirt as he goes to unlock the front door and finds that Joe forgot to lock it at all on the way out, Nicky's eyes bright and chiding, cutting over his shoulder as he herds Joe into the front hall, the quiet familiar dark and the warmth of Nicky in his arms, clinging much closer and much longer than two men who are just friends should cling.

Theknowing look that Nicky gives him when he finds the mess of Joe's books scattered across the living room floor, not saying anything, just shoving the ruined box into their overflowing recycling bin and getting the packing tape and folding a new one.

There are moments when it could end: going to different grad schools in different cities, having to justify long weekends sleeping on Amtrak to their friends and colleagues when they're not tied to each other in any traditional sense, Joe's aunt in San Francisco trying to get him to agree to an arranged marriage, Nicky's strict Catholic parents accusing him of being gay when he brings Joe home for the holidays and Nicky walking out instead of telling them they're right.

The long train ride back to Boston afterwards, Nicky's head pillowed on Joe's shoulder, his whole body a tense unhappy knot even in sleep, Joe fielding calls from Nicky's sister Lucrezia, assuring her that he'd have Nicky call her in the morning, hanging up and holding the warm brick of Nicky's phone, just studying the shape of his fingers and the faint line between his eyebrows, shifting carefully so as not to wake him, wanting to put his back between Nicky and the rest of the mostly-empty train car, between Nicky and the world.

*

It doesn't end. Joe comes down with a particularly nasty flu and goes to the university hospital in Philadelphia and while they're admitting him he might say _Nicky._ He doesn't know because he has a 104-degree fever.

But when he wakes up Nicky is there, asleep in the chair next to Joe's bed in a room that is not private at all, the curtain draped over the top of his head, and Joe reaches out and grabs the toe of his shoe weakly, and Nicky comes awake like a shock. His feet hit the floor. His hands come for Joe's face and hesitate, like he's worried he might hurt him, so Joe has to grab his wrists and guide his palms. "Nicolo," he murmurs.

Nicky shakes his head. His thumbs sweep over the line of Joe's beard, and his fingers are trembling.Joe can see him trying to speak, trying to work up to it, but whatever it is never makes it out of Nicky's throat. He bends, he presses his forehead to Joe's--Joe tries to push him away, babbling something about infections and vomiting and weird dreams, but Nicky won't budge.

"Don't go without me," he says, intense, too intense, close enough that Joe can feel the heat of his tears. "You aren't allowed to go without me. Never."

And it doesn't end; Joe's hands grabbing Nicky's hair just this side of pulling, their mouths pressed together too tight to be called a kiss, the nurse coming in and telling Nicky the same thing Joe did--the nurse, a day later, slipping Nicky Tylenol out of the hospital supply, Nicky sitting sniffly and miserable on the edge of the bed, a tissue in one hand and the other clasped in both of Joe's, held against his heart.

*

"I got a hotel room," Nicky says when Joe shows up at his office, expecting to find it inexplicably empty for the seventeenth day in a row. "I think it's...best, for now."

Joe has called him twice a day every day since he disappeared more than two weeks ago; he's told Nicky's voicemail box that he loves it more times than he can count, caught his boyfriend only for a few brief conversations in which Nicky sounded exhausted and worried and refused to say where he was or what he was doing.

Now Joe stands in the door with a knife in his chest and can't figure out why.

"No," he says, with a humorless laugh. "No. It's never best for us to be apart. You've been gone long enough already. Just come home--"

"I can't." It sounds like it's been torn out of him. "I can't, Yusuf, please don't ask me to."

"Of course I'm going to ask you to." Joe goes around the side of his desk and reaches for him, but Nicky flinches back. That hurts more than anything Joe's ever felt; Nicky has never _, never_ refused his touch. Dread drops like a brick in his stomach. "Nicolo," he murmurs. "Tell me what happened. Come home. We can fix this--whatever it is. Let me fix it."

Nicky's about to cry. Joe always knows when he's about to cry, and this is going to be one of the bad ones, like when Nicky's father died and his mother wouldn't let him come to the funeral, collapsed on the kitchen floor in their apartment in New York, Nicky shaking and gritting his teeth in Joe's arms until at last he went limp and quiet and Joe got him up and took him to bed.

Joe's prepared to do it again here, in the relatively public space of Nicky's office in the History Department of Northeastern, but Nicky does something Joe's never seen him do before: he fast-forwards to the next morning, untangling from Joe and climbing out of bed like his limbs were a thousand years old and re-assembling himself with a cup of coffee and a cheap tie.

He does it all in the space of seconds.

Then he says, "I need you to give me this."

Joe lets his hands fall to his sides. He searches for some clue-- _any_ clue to what the hell's going on--but Nicky turns away before he can find one. "Yusuf," he says.

"Okay, Nicky," Joe's voice is soft. "Okay."

But he can't leave without it, just in case, so he runs his fingers through Nicky's hair and bends for a long, lingering kiss.

Nicky clings to the front of his sweater like he's afraid someone is going to tear him away, which is ridiculous--as if Joe would ever let someone take him. He makes a small noise against Joe's mouth, a noise Joe's never heard before, and he has to fight down the sudden urge to gather Nicky up in his arms and hold onto him even when he tries to get away.

More than anything, he's afraid, but he tries not to let it show. He tries to keep himself under control as Nicky tilts his lips away, as he rests their foreheads together for one last moment before tearing himself away and going to stand at the window, looking out over the springtime quad.

Joe wants to yell at the familiar line of his back, but he drags a hand over his face and forces himself to walk out the door before he can do anything to make it worse.

*

Joe spends the rest of the day hiding in the French Department, drinking coffee from their fancy coffee machine and curling up in the fetal position on Booker's couch. He listens to Booker on the phone with Andy, saying, " _C'est une petite querelle d'amoureux, ils sont stupides_ ," asking her to cover Joe's afternoon lecture on the theology of the First Crusade; he reminds Booker that he does, in fact, speak pretty good French; he gets out when Professor Lelivre's office hours start and goes to hide in the East Asian Studies Department instead, where he should've started anyways, because Quynh more than anyone understands the pain of having a cryptic lover.

But Quynh barely listens to his lamentations ( _Oh, God, he's taken another lover. He's forsaken me. It's because I can't cook._ ) and when he's finished--when she asks, "Are you done?" and he nods miserably--she kicks the chair out from under him and snaps, "Fanastic. Then get the hell out of here. Don't stand for subterfuge. Follow him to his fucking hotel room and settle this once and for all. You're scaring my bonsais."

*

Joe doesn't take her advice immediately. He doesn't take her advice for hours.

He goes home and haunts their apartment, which feels somehow more empty than it has for the last seventeen days now that he knows Nicky is somewhere just across town, now that he knows Nicky is laying alone in bed like he's laying alone in bed, curled around an empty space like a parenthesis that someone forgot to put words in. Now that he's seen how much Nicky's hurting.

It's impossible to stay in bed; he suddenly has no idea how he slept at all for the past two weeks, even with his face mashed in Nicky's pillow, so he gets up and pulls a shirt on and walks, from the kitchen to the living room to the cramped, odd-shaped hall closet where they keep the photo albums they don't like to look at, volumes of Joe's childhood home just outside Baghdad, rubble now along with his parents, of Nicky's family, his cousins and sisters and grandparents--his father holding two-year-old Nicky on his knee at the kitchen table, tomato sauce everywhere, both of them laughing. Joe ends up on the floor with an album open in his lap--not either of their family albums, but one from college, both of them baby-faced and stupid, mugging for the camera at frat parties and caught passed out at late-night study sessions and stiff but proud in graduation regalia.

They had no idea, then, really. Joe gets to the last photo and realizes that he has his hands on Nicky, wrapped around his shoulders, and then he pages backwards through the album, looking at the same photos, and realizes that in every single one of them they're touching, like they can't bear not to have that proof of where the other is in space.

They had no idea, they were idiots, and sometimes it still feels enormous and embarrassing to Joe, how much he loves Nicolo DiGenova, how much of his day is devoted to him, thinking, talking, touching, sleeping. But he wouldn't have it any other way; he could live a thousand years and never have it any other way. To even think of an alternative feels like sacrilege.

*

The night before Nicky's dissertation defense is what Joe imagines it would've been like to keep vigil outside a medieval bedchamber while a woman gave birth.

Nicky paces, he turns the TV on, he turns it off. He turns it on again just to snap answers at reruns of _Jeopardy!_ and then get volcanically mad in a panicked sort of way when they're wrong, babbling clumsily through heated Italian lectures on the archaeological differences between late Etruscan ruins and early Roman even though the original question had something to do with the movie _Highlander_. Joe sits with him in the kitchen while he cooks something like five batches of spaghetti; he seals the spaghetti in gallon sized freezer bags and runs his hand up and down Nicky's spine and presses soothing kisses to the hinge of his jaw and lets him talk until he wears himself out.

Every instrument in the apartment that has an alarm is set to wake them at six a.m.; Joe succeeds in coaxing Nicky into bed sometime around three, but Nicky just lays on his back with his hands on his head and keeps talking over and over every microscopic facet of his dissertation, until it's all Joe can do to stay awake and listen.

But he does; of course he does; it's Nicky. He stays awake, he blinks hard and shakes himself and Nicky notices, turns on his side and regards Joe in the halflight with those piercing blue eyes and asks, "Is it ever too much? You'll tell me if it's too much, won't you?"

Joe asks _what?_

A hint of a smile that's not a smile tugs at Nicky's lips. "This weight I ask you to carry," he says. "You do so much for me. You give me so much and I give you nothing."

And Joe is suddenly wide awake and stone sober. He takes Nicky's face in his hands, thumbs reverent on his skin, and he draws him in for a warm, sleepy kiss, and he forgets to tell him.

*

It's not rocket science. They're on the same phone account. Joe can open an app and see where Nicky is whenever he wants, he just doesn't usually stoop to use it. Well, tonight he does.

Tonight he goes to a Sheraton with war in his heart; Nicky can yell at him, he can rage, he can throw things, he can hit him and cry and say whatever he pleases, but Joe will not go. The track of his life was decided more than a decade ago by random roommate selection or by destiny, depending on who you ask. Who is he to argue with such forces?

He tells the man at the front desk that his boyfriend is expecting him and gets the room number with no trouble. They do ask him to take up something that Nicky's apparently called down to request--a shopping bag full of baby toys. Rattles, binkies, brightly colored stuffed animals. Joe tries to tell them that they must have the wrong room number, but they're adamant, and he figures he can always bring it back down later with Nicky to back him up.

But then Nicky answers the door with a baby on his hip, and the world stops.

"Joe," Nicky says, surprised. "What are you doing here?"

Joe can't take his eyes off the baby. She has Nicolo's eyes, and a riot of curly dark hair. She could almost be theirs, if it weren't anatomically impossible. "Nicky," he says, slowly. "I think you need to explain to me what's going on."

Nicky spots the bag in Joe's hand. "Oh, are those the toys?" He makes the impatient hand motion that means he wants to be handed something, and somehow in the process of handing him the toy bag Joe ends up in the room with the door closed.

It looks like a disaster area. There are baby things everywhere--onesies hanging off the back of the desk chair, clean diapers in a teetering stack near a portable changing station, kids DVDs fanned out under the TV, a hotel-issue crib next to the bed and empty bottles on top of the mini fridge. Nicky has spit-up on his shirt and orange baby food crusted in his hairline and two of his suits--the two he took when he disappeared--are hanging wrinkled in the open closet.

Joe stands inside the door feeling shellshocked while Nicky fishes through the toys, finds a binky, cleans it in the sink in the bathroom, and installs the baby in the crib. She makes soft baby noises and Nicky leans down to kiss her forehead and calls her _patatina_ and _Ama_ and _vita mia_.

He lingers over her for a long time after she calms down and dozes off. Joe helps himself to the desk chair and waits for Nicky to stop stalling and talk to him.

At last, he does. Still standing, with his back to Joe, he says, "She's Lucrezia's." Then corrects, "No. She _was_ Lucrezia's. She's mine now. Amalia DiGenova."

Joe feels unmoored. He stares at the tiny human in the crib. Keeps staring even when Nicky turns to look at him. He can't take his eyes away. "What happened?"

Nicky's about to come apart again, like he was in the office, and damned if Joe's going to let him knuckle through it alone this time."A car accident," he says. "Luca...she never knew who the father was. And she didn't want our mother raising her baby."

Joe searches his face. "Why didn't you tell me? I could've gone with you. I could've..."

"No. I couldn't ask you to do that. This is the next eighteen years of my life, Joe. It's...it's the rest of my life. You didn't ask for this, for raising my niece."

"I love you."

"I know. I know, Yusuf. But this--it's different. It's not the flu."

Joe laughs. Relief is creeping over him, so overwhelming that he can't help it. "Yes, you're right. It's not the flu, it's a baby."

Nicky gives him an unamused look, the one he uses when he doesn't think Joe should be joking--in doctor's appointments, talking to the police, when their bathroom is flooded and they have to fix it themselves.

Joe gets up and goes to him; he takes Nicky's shoulders in his hands, and Nicky doesn't collapse into him like he normally does but he doesn't retreat, either, which is a marked improvement on this morning. "Nicolo DiGenova," Joe says, careful with every syllable. "I love you. I want to share every part of your life."

"Yusuf..."

" _Every part,"_ Joe emphasizes.

Nicky holds his gaze, desperate for something that Joe hopes he can give him.

"I've been here five minutes," Joe says. "Five minutes, and I see how much you love that baby. She's yours, which means she's ours, yours and mine, and there is no world, Nicky, in which I will not love her as much as I love you."

The fissure splits.

Nicky blinks rapidly, fighting tears, and he manages to agree, “Ours.”

Then his face is pressed into Joe's shoulder too tight to talk, his fingers digging into Joe's back, and Joe wraps his arms as far around him as they'll go and holds him while he falls apart.

Nicky's not a loud crier, never has been; he grits his teeth and hides his face and waits for it to pass, but this time it doesn't pass, this time the baby spits her binky out and starts to wail and Nicky's still shaking so Joe's the one to pick her up.

Joe's the one to rock her on his hip, to shift her from arm to arm so he can get out of his coat, her tiny hands pawing at his beard, meeting her bright blue eyes and smiling down at her while she smiles her toothless smile at him, and Joe toes his shoes off and bounces around the confines of the hotel room and starts thinking about looking for a two-bedroom apartment and college funds and neighborhoods with good kindergartens and whether Nicky will talk to her in Italian and whether it would be okay for him to talk to her in Arabic.

"Ama," he says for now, charmed by her gurgling laugh. " _Vita mia_."

There's a choked noise from behind him, Nicky coming out of the bathroom. He wraps his arms around Joe's waist and rests his face against the back of his shoulder, and they sway together while Amalia quiets down, and Joe feels the sort of contentment that belongs in a photo album: his family is together, his family is safe, his family is whole.

*

Since both of them apply for paternity leave at the same time, word gets around fast. There's a laughing voicemail from Quynh with jokes about how you shouldn't have babies to save a marriage, a solemn oath from Booker that if he should be chosen as the godfather he would proudly lay down his life for their child, a letter from the dean expressing concern that both of his medieval studies professors have vanished at the same time, and a vaguely panicked-sounding e-mail from Andy promising swift and brutal retribution if they ever ask her to babysit.

It takes Joe three weeks to get to any of it. He's busy painting a nursery.

*

In the dark of that first night he lays in the room at the Sheraton curled around Nicky's back with their baby breathing soft and easy and thinks about Iraq, thinks about their cramped roach-infested dorm room, thinks about roaming campus all night unwilling to go home because he wasn't sure Nicky would be there if he did.

He thinks about how he'd felt on that Amtrak train and in that shared hospital room in Philadelphia, like he had accidentally wandered into someone else's life, like Nicky was something too good to be real, like it would make more sense if he woke up and discovered he'd been in a coma the whole time, discovered they'd fished him out of the rubble with his parents in Baghdad, discovered he'd dreamed it all. Dreamed him. He remembers thinking how hard he'd fight to get back in that coma, how he'd bash his own head in and dive off buildings and beg the doctors on his knees; he would do anything for this life, to keep it.

And he remembers something else, so he wakes Nicolo with a hand on his face, fingers in his hair, turning him toward him in the warm cocoon under the comforter. Nicky blinks awake. His eyes focus on Joe. He murmurs his name, a question.

Joe kisses it off his tongue. Kisses the bone of his chin. Kisses the thin fluttering skin just under his eye. Kisses him with his whole body, rolling Nicky underneath him, and says, "You give me yourself. That is everything I could ever ask. Everything I could ever want. You have to know that."

Nicky gazes back at him in the bare inches between their faces, steady and understanding. And Joe knows that he knows exactly what he's talking about, years too late. But he doesn't ask _why now_ or _why not then._

He just pulls Joe back down, and goes to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered” -F. Scott Fitzgerald


End file.
